Havana: Cuba has rejected its inclusion on a recent US State Department backlist of ‘state sponsors of international terrorism.’
“The US government has absolutely no moral nor any right to judge Cuba, who has an unblemished history in the fight against terrorism and has also been consistently a victim of this scourge,” said a Cuban Foreign Ministry statement.
Cuba also accused the US of ‘political manipulation of such a sensitive issue as the fight against terrorism, a news agency reports.
It said ‘the terrorist actions against Cuba which were organised, financed and perpetrated from the US territory, often with the complicity of the government itself,’ have killed 3,478 Cubans and injured another 2,099.
The statement denounced that ‘the sole purpose of the US is to discredit Cuba and justify the economic embargo against the island, which has been held for half a century.’
The Cuban government asked for the end of the US "blockade and hostility" and for ‘punishment for the real terrorists,’ referring to the anti-Castro groups based in Miami, the report said.
The recently released annual report of the US State Department placed Cuba on the blacklist of countries sponsoring terrorism, along with Syria, Sudan and Iran.
ANI
First Published: Sunday, August 21, 2011, 15:58